ABSTRACT
Between 1938 and 1942, Gunnar Myrdal, a Swedish economist, carried out a vast investigation concerning the life of Black people in the US and this survey was published in New York under the title An American Dilemma, in 1944. Any Platonic hope of this sort is doomed to disappointment, hence her numerous remarks pointing to a feeling that she came too late. After all, Plato's works themselves involve a gloomy imaginary of decline: people create an ideal city and then it degenerates. Perhaps in Jean-Paul Sartre's mind too, except that he would not have created a general category encompassing all 'given characters', 'those of woman, the Jew or the Black' standing first of all as examples. Some people ground their self-confidence in the assumption of an inborn talent to be a woman who can achieve what a woman is, others in the idea that human beings are all born with a vocation to be free.
